Some organizations must deal with computational burdens which require the orchestrated efforts of tens of thousands of processors over months or years. These problems of scale are often described as “grand challenges” and require processing capabilities on the order of 1015 floating point operations per second (“PETAFLOPS”). Power needs on such a large scale require tremendous computing power distributed among a very large number of processors. In addition to the immense size and cost of the large number of machines involved, organizations are faced with the additional challenge of providing adequate and cost-efficient cooling for these machines.
For many applications, in particular molecular dynamics, the processors, once distributed, exhibit a pure broadcast gating communication pattern. A pure broadcast is one that reaches every destination node. Packets should not be lost, duplicated or re-ordered on the network.
Examples of such computational problems are those which are solved by “n-body,” or “many-body” (“the problem of predicting the motions of three or more objects obeying Newton's laws of motion and attracting each other according to Newton's law of gravitation,” from Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, Fifth Edition, McGraw-Hill, Inc, 1994) computations such as planetary motion or molecular dynamics as applied to protein folding where the dominant computational burden is due to two-body interactions. In this class of problems, each atomic body has a spatial location which must be sent to every other atomic body at each time step where it is used to calculate the force between the two bodies. An example of such a problem is the simulation of the folding of a protein which might require 32,000 atomic bodies and 1012 time steps.
Another problem that can make use of pure broadcast is the brute force cryptographic attack, such as those used by the United States government in decrypting communications concerning national security. Currently, such attacks are often performed using many idle personal workstations and take very long periods of time.
Accordingly, it would be desirable and highly advantageous to have a fiber optics-based scalable computer capable of handling the above and other problems that have a very significant computational cost associated therewith.